On Twitter, Russ Roberts writes,
The caravan is a perfect example of @KlingBlog’s great insight into politics and ideology, the three languages of politics
He refers to the caravan of migrants trying to cross from Central America to the United States. Indeed, from a progressive point of view, the main point is that the migrants are an oppressed class and those who want to stop them are oppressors. From a conservative point of view, the main point is that clear national borders are part of civilization and crossing those borders without permission is barbarism. And from a libertarian point of view, national borders are used to keep people from engaging in voluntary exchanges: between worker and employer; between landowner and tenant, or buyer. I am pretty certain I could find all three types of commentary on the caravan.
A more subtle point is that the three languages help explain what gets into the news and sticks there. If an event can arouse strong outrage on all three dimensions, it sticks, regardless of its long-term significance, or lack thereof. So the NFL football players kneeling during the national anthem was a major story, as is the caravan. For a story to gain prominence, it helps if it can be quickly and easily digested into outrage along the three axes.
I cringe that these melodramas are classified as “politics.” We need a different term. Perhaps “outrage theater.”
The Caravan is an example of the mass South to North migrations that are dramatically changing the global north in ways that are fundamentally transformative and could potentially impact things for centuries to come (or more). As such its hugely newsworthy, if only as a focused example of something that plays out millions of times and has a huge cumulative effect. If you can’t stop the Caravan, you can’t stop migration generally. It’s hard to think of a single thing in society today that is more important than the demographic composition that your grandchildren will be dealing with, since that composition will determine the nature of every single other possible issue.
The NFL players kneeling reinforces the idea that blacks don’t see themselves as American and fundamentally can never be a part of the broader culture. The BLM movement they participate in reinforces this both in terms of urban crime (which has gone up) and identity politics more broadly (want a look into a dark identity politics future, imagine one where they have the votes to implement the policy recommendations on the BLM website). White Flight resulted in huge decreases in wealth and welfare in this country, and most of the problems in our real estate and education sectors boil down to people paying huge premiums to avoid urban blacks.
I wouldn’t call these unimportant. They touch on hugely important factors in our society today with far reaching implications. Obviously, any “symbol” of a generalized trend won’t be as important as the trend itself, but symbols are how we express ourselves about trends.
“Outrage theatre” is good.
Someone wrote about a certain aspect of politics being “the manipulation of the political spectacle.” You should be able to find that reference with an internet search.
But yes, the outrage helps hold the attention.
With all the talk of nationalism in the last couple of weeks, I was reminded of a scholar who wrote about “mundane nationalism.” He meant the flag hanging in the corner of the classroom or the city hall meeting room, hardly noticed.
With all the attention to outrage theatre, it can crowd out interest in the “mundane specifics” of government and politics. That is Thomas Sowell’s term: some specialize in verbal virtuosity, while competence and knowledge has more to do with “mundane specifics.”
If you are paranoid, you might think we are being manipulated by people who want us to focus on the caravan while hardly noticing malfeasance or incompetence in government close to home–tax policy, zoning, preferments, pensions, licensing and barriers to entry, etc, &c.
In a happy bit of serendipity, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution today links to an article entitled “Forecasting tournaments, epistemic humility and attitude depolarization” by Mellers, Tetlock and Arkes.
The article decries the sort of polarized thinking that TLP describes but suggests that right-thinking can be induced by forecasting tournaments in which individuals are forced to translate their beliefs into “nuanced probability judgments” that are then tracked for accuracy:
People often express political opinions in starkly dichotomous terms, such as “Trump will either trigger a ruinous trade war or save U.S. factory workers from disaster.” This mode of communication promotes polarization into ideological in-groups and out-groups. We explore the power of an emerging methodology, forecasting tournaments, to encourage clashing factions to do something odd: to translate their beliefs into nuanced probability judgments and track accuracy over time and questions. In theory, tournaments advance the goals of “deliberative democracy” by incentivizing people to be flexible belief updaters whose views converge in response to facts, thus depolarizing unnecessarily polarized debates. We examine the hypothesis that, in the process of thinking critically about their beliefs, tournament participants become more moderate in their own political attitudes and those they attribute to the other side. We view tournaments as belonging to a broader class of psychological inductions that increase epistemic humility and that include asking people to explore alternative perspectives, probing the depth of their cause-effect understanding and holding them accountable to audiences with difficult-to-guess views.
How could we apply this to the so-called “caravan” issue?
First off, it is important to know that few if any facts specific to this group of people will ever be recorded making the accuracy of any prediction relative to them difficult or impossible to ascertain. Indeed, governmental entities aided by the authoritarian main stream media will actively suppress any effort to allow any data at all about the caravan members to see the light of day. We see this already in the way the agencies are undercutting their political leaderships statements on the caravan and the main stream media is suppressing the statements about the caravan made by the government of Mexico.
Some predictions will simply be off the table. For example:
• More than 100 children from the caravan will wind up in already over-crowded public schools.
• Members of the caravan will murder more than 5 US citizens in the next 5 years.
• Government welfare programs spending on caravan members will exceed 5 times what they pay in taxes over the next 5 years.
• “I was a member of the caravan” will be a highly successful college admissions essay topic at elite universities.
And I suppose the true is the same of other predictions that could be made from the illegal-immigration/door-step refugee sympathizers’ viewpoint:
• Caravan members will enrich the multicultural fabric of our society and their diversity will beneficially supplant sterile white nativist culture.
• By demonstrating love and acceptance in taking in these poor huddled masses, the US will shine as a beacon encouraging other nations like China and Japan to accept increased numbers of refugees.
• Yada yada yada… insert your favorite morally superior pronouncement here.
I obviously cannot or am unwilling to pass a Turing test on this. I have a foreign girlfriend for whom I am unable to get a tourist visa so I am especially embittered about this topic and not really interested in giving up that bitterness at the moment.
Nevertheless, I would like to suggest that maybe there should be a 4th axis – the cosmopolitan – working class axis. The cosmopolitans are most concerned with the moral superiority of a position and the working class are most concerned with the practical implications of a position. Here are some predictions that I think will illustrate the contours of this polarization:
• During the next two years, Democrat members of congress will not introduce legislation to provide permanent residency visas to current H-1-B visa holders.
• During the next two years, Democrats will introduce legislation to grant citizenship status to illegal aliens residing in the US.
• During the next two years, the current 1 million immigration case backlog will double to 2 million.
• The US will not adopt a point’s based immigration program or replace its current “diversity” lottery or reform its extended family member admissions program.
• The percentage of workers earning the minimum wage will increase in the next 2 years.
It is relatively easy, for a certain sort of elite, to smirk at the little people and their petty concerns, but when push comes to shove, the morally superior have but little to offer pragmatically.
Kind of a tangent but you have accidentally hit the nail on the head of why immigration talk is so infuriating to me:
> • During the next two years, Democrat members of congress will not introduce legislation to provide permanent residency visas to current H-1-B visa holders.
I’m a foreigner on a TN visa in the US. I have been in the US on TN visas for almost 7 years now. During this time I’ve paid about $350,000 in total taxes, if I’m doing my math right.
But I’m not allowed to collect any social security or medicare benefits, since, if I ever become unemployed, I have to leave.
And I’m not allowed to vote, or even attempt permanent residency, because TNs are non-immigrant visas.
I have objectively contributed more to society than any of these caravan members will (heck, more than a large chunk of Americans ever will!) but I’m still treated like an afterthought. And my peers and colleagues, many of whom are strongly vocally in favour of open borders, don’t seem to care one way or another about my situation.
Because I’m not “oppressed”. TLP indeed
Truthfully, I feel for you. It would be in the US’s best interests to grant permanent residence to TN and H-1B visa holders. It will not happen because Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix fear the competition that US access to a wider pool of talent would bring. It is also the reason the tech hegemons bankroll Democrats. Any Republican with the sense of a goose would demand permanent residency for TN and H-1B visa holders as the price for any amnesty for Dreamers etc.
You’re not an afterthought, you’re a contractor.
I might have a contractor re-do my kitchen, but I’m not going to take him on vacation or invite him to participate in family decision making.
What a bizarre thing to say. He’s not complaining that he doesn’t get to vote on immigration matters. He’s complaining that when Americans think about immigration matters, they should give as much consideration to TN and H1-B visa members as they do to Latin American immigrants.
And I’m confused about your apparent contempt here. I though the Trump-fan position on immigration was that it should be more based on skills (like Canada’s) so that it should favor educated, productive potential immigrants like ‘techanon’. No?
And enough with the ridiculous “immigrants are uninvited guests in *your* ‘house'” metaphor.
What’s bizarre about it? Look up the definition of what a TN visa is. He is quite intrinsically not an immigrant. Pointing out what something is does not constitute contempt.
We don’t really know what techanon is talking about. We only know it bothers him that his peers and colleagues don’t seem to care one way or another about his “situation”. What does that mean? Perhaps he will tell us.
He came into the US under a certain premise, and it sounds like he’s made a respectable amount of money doing it. He has not even claimed that he asked to be given immigration status.
If we want to keep more skilled workers, we should issue more green cards. techanon should apply for one if that’s the consideration he is seeking. Taking a concept like a TN visa and reversing its basic premise is just the kind of convoluted policy stuff none of us should be in favor of.
“If we want to keep more skilled workers, we should issue more green cards. techanon should apply for one if that’s the consideration he is seeking.”
Yes. But that is a potentially risky move. A TN visa is good for three years and can be renewed indefinitely. You can apply for a green card while on a TN via. BUT if the green card is not approved (or not approved before the TN expires), then you’re SOL. Your application for a green card means you intend to stay permanently which means you’re not eligible for a TN renewal. That seems like a dumb rule to me — one that it makes sense for techanon to suggest we consider changing.
The whole thing can be seen in the single word “invasion”. From a conservative view, it’s a completely appropriate term to use to describe a large influx of people that are forcing their way in. From a progressive view, it’s simply dehumanizing rhetoric as it compares people to something like pests, or some other kind of enemy. Same word, two completely different interpretations!
Is it your contention that this is a misunderstanding? Do you believe Trump was using the softer intrusive version of the word (i.e: “invasion of privacy”) rather than the harsher militaristic one?
I think he is absolutely using in the literal militaristic sense, e.g. “Germany invaded Poland”. The charge from the left is that of a dehumanizing sense, drawing a parallel from illegal immigrants to unwanted pests – “my house was invaded by flies”
I think both sides are quite close in terms of common meaning. I think you would agree that Trump isn’t asserting an immediate existential military threat, but rather a “plague” like invasion that brings crime, disease and social parasites. He has often used such language.
No, I think he is asserting an immediate military threat. It’s why he constantly talks about crime, MI-13, and wants to send the military. Whether or not this threat is real is of course debatable
OK, but isn’t that the conceit here? Deploying the military requires a certain extraordinary justification, but this is not an extraordinary situation.
Trump loves to play in between meanings like this. The threat is real. Its just also mundane. There really are people heading for our border. Some of them will try to sneak in. Some will commit crimes because almost any population block will.
He saw political capital in greatly exaggerating the scale of the threat and making the dramatic gesture of military deployment just prior to the election. He knows there is just enough space in a word like “invasion” (or “nationalist”) to publicly claim one thing and signal another.
My beef with your comment is the implication that this is just an innocent difference in interpretation.
Trump is not the first to escalate threats, just ask Robert Bork. I also have serious doubts about signalling, a.k.a “dog-whistles”. It’s more likely politicians are directly appealing to their core supporters using standard language (here, law-and-order conservatives) than sending secretly coded messages. This is one area where the left routinely goes off the rails
I’m somewhat mystified why it matters whether Trump was the first person to dishonestly escalate a threat or not. Would you let a murderer off because someone else has done it before?
I probably shouldn’t have used the word “signaling” here. I do think that fits Trump’s embrace of the term “nationalist”, but that’s not the issue being discussed.
I don’t think signaling is a good way to describe open fear mongering and demonizing. There was nothing coded going on there. Better to say that he knows he can conflate multiple meanings of the word “invasion” to describe the caravan and to justify deployment of the military. He knows he can simply bluster past the resulting complaints from the press and most of his base won’t care at all, or even think “there goes the press again disrespecting the President”.
I think it’s also a good example “Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect”.
Experts know journalism about the things they know about is terrible – borderline or actual “fake news”, but then go on consuming other journalism, as if it were more believable elsewhere.
Coverage of “the caravan” has been awful. The major messages so far have been:
1. There is just one big group;
2. This kind of thing is a rare, special event;
3. Migrants are mostly walking;
4. The administration intends on preventing anyone from entering; and
5. Military involvement will be in the form of actively and directly preventing entry.
All five of these claims are false.
Can you cite any sources for these false claims?
People rarely discuss “trends and forces” happening over a long period of time. Rather they discuss symbolic/concrete instances of those trends and forces.
We’ve imported about 50 million Hispanics over the last several decades. That is absolutely HUGE. It will have profound effects on our society. The specific instance of the caravan is a small and ultimately not important number of individuals, but it is the concrete example of the other 50 million and their effect. It’s also a signal to other would be immigrants (if they get in, I can get in too). So while the fate of a few thousand people isn’t important, as a stand in for 50+ million it is important.
Similarly with BLM. Whether a person kneels during the anthem isn’t important. Honestly, an increase in the murder rate in some black ghettos isn’t that important (though we’re getting closer). However, White Flight driven by that behavior is. It is one of the most expensive wealth destroying things that happened on this country in the last few decades. It bleeds over into our real estate and education sectors (whose prices and policies are driven largely by desire to flee blacks). It makes reform impossible. Kneeling isn’t important. The ideology that makes kneeling acceptable is important.
Lastly, BLM is a sort of dominance display. If I can get away with kneeling during the anthem, what other identity politics agitprop can I get away with?
Here is an idea for an trial run of open borders. Package open immigration for PhD or equivalent credentialed foreigners with an education cost containment package: in order for its students to remain eligible for federal financial aid, a university must freeze its number of faculty and reduce their faculty payroll by 30% within 2 years. Everybody wins. Immigrants find more remunerative positions in the US. The obscene cost of higher education in the US gets a little attention. Universities would be freed to fire current faculty freeing them to attend coding bootcamps and become more productive members of society. And an influx of fresh blood into the academy might actually produce some socially useful scholarship. A pareto optimal policy if I do say so myself. Don’t see how anyone could object.
It’s only theater if you think the large and continued inflow of aliens doesn’t matter.
Yes it matters, but we’re adults.
Its a lot like paying taxes. There are certainly millions of people who break some of the laws. This results in billions in uncollected taxes, and significant unfairness. And yet, many conservatives favor a light approach from the IRS. I think we can all agree that 100% compliance is the fairest system, but we all also know there is a real cost to all of us to have an IRS that aggressively enforces the tax laws. We accept the tradeoffs because we understand that some level of slack in the system produces a better functioning society.
And that, of course, is where the difference lies. People who don’t think the caravan really matters say it’s only a few thousand people.
People who do think it matters think of how easy it is to game the US asylum system, how many poor people there are in the world, how population keeps going up in poor countries, and how polling suggests that several billion (with a B) people would like to move to the US. They feel that there will be a tremendous demand for moving to the US and that well-publicized stories like the “caravan” will cause more and more of that demand to be satisfied–legally or illegally.
No doubt this is unfair, but many who worry about the “caravan” see the situation as similar to one is which a major political party says, “Pay what you think is right. We won’t check.”
“They feel that there will be a tremendous demand for moving to the US and that well-publicized stories like the “caravan” will cause more and more of that demand to be satisfied–legally or illegally.”
Ah, but why do they feel that way?
In the reality based world, a modest decline of that demand is being satisfied. The truth is that illegal immigration peaked under the Bush administration and it was brought down to a slight decline under the Obama administration. Our net population of illegal immigrants is declining modestly.
Since this was mostly accomplished under a Democratic administration, there is evidence that compromises could be made.
Real progress is about much more nuts and bolts legislative, foreign policy and operational improvements. Trump has the necessary popular support to move the ball here.
Or he could just use it as a wedge issue.
Ah, but why do they feel that way?
They feel that way from some pretty simple reasoning: the US is rich; much of the world is poor. Most people would rather be rich than poor. American governments are less corrupt than most governments in “less developed” countries and crime is less of a problem than in many poor areas of the world. That means that it is harder to become less poor and to stay less poor in much of the world. Even more incentive to leave.
Staying poor also means that a country does not undergo the “demographic transition” that comes in wealthier countries, as people now have few enough children to stabilize the population. More poor people means more people who want to go some place better. In Europe that generally means crossing the Mediterranean. In America, that generally means crossing the US/Mexico border.
Which is, of course, what the “caravan” wants to do. It becomes a symbol of all those other people who want to cross themselves.
The truth is that illegal immigration peaked under the Bush administration and it was brought down to a slight decline under the Obama administration. Our net population of illegal immigrants is declining modestly.
I’m not sure where you’re getting those figures from. Getting accurate numbers for people who are illegally here is, pretty much by definition, impossible. My impression is that illegal immigration did indeed peak under Bush, went down as the 2008 recession got worse, may even have been a net negative for a while, but has picked up as the US economy has picked up. And would be bigger if Trump weren’t doing his scary, blowhard thing.
Every year the Department of Homeland Security, the Center for Migration Studies, and the Pew Research Center all take a stab at the size of the unauthorized population, usually with a three to four year lag. The numbers come out pretty close, which makes it look a consensus which has been independently verified, but is actually because they all use more or less the same methodology, models, and data sources (mostly from the Census Bureau).
And the trouble is, the data and models are pretty poor. The attempts to corroborate them with residency numbers and vital statistics are also fraught with their own problems because of disparate averages in subpopulations (e.g., sex ratios).
For those that think “Well, the Trump administration surely would want to inflate the numbers as much as possible, and so if the numbers stay low, then it must be true,” keep in mind that the head of immigration statistics is an Obama appointee holdover.
That’s one reason that when Feinstein, Kaplan, and Fazel-Zarandi took a different approach, it created quite a stir, because their mean estimate doubled that of the other.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0201193
There is of course plenty of criticism of their approach and counting of ‘circular flows’, but in my judgment it is no more dispositive than the criticism of the three main mainstream approaches.
As it is, the Border Patrol interdict or apprehend over a thousand people a day attempting irregular migration outside of ports of entry, and of course there are plenty they don’t catch, or who simply enter through a POE and don’t go back. Any approach which shows a mostly stable aggregate population in the midst of such inbound flows is highly suspect, and indeed, the researchers often have to speculate on the reasons which might resolve this mystery, though often quite unpersuasively.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/27/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/
http://www.pewhispanic.org/2011/12/28/appendix-a-deportations-reported-by-ice/
It is fair to cite the 2008 recession as a major factor. But the numbers do not suggest that the numbers went back up during the recovery.
Deportations went up fairly dramatically under the Obama administration and they took some criticism for this from some supporters, so it also appears that the prior Democratic administration did not behave at all like Trump claims.
The standard stuff about how we are rich country with jobs and there are billions of people who want to come here has been true for a long time.
When I asked “why do they feel this way”, I was citing your comment that they feel stories like the caravan “will cause more and more of that demand to be satisfied”.
That story was a pumped by political operatives. Suddenly, now that the election is over, Fox News has stopped covering it. America has had 20-30,000 or more people coming in illegally each month for decades. This particular migration has happened for several years. The caravan was not a bold new attempt to expand illegal immigration.
So the question is why do voters feel this situation is getting worse now? And if your goal is to fix things, do you behave this way?
Handle’s comments about the problems inherent in quantifying illegal immigration are fair. But that door swings both ways.
So the question is why do voters feel this situation is getting worse now?
I don’t know that lots feel it’s getting worse. They feel that it’s bad and not getting dealt with.
How would you feel if someone said, “I don’t know why voters are getting worked up about black people being lynched. The numbers peaked 15 years ago and it’s just been a few a month for several years now. There is no ‘bold new attempt to expand’ lynching. The most recent public lynching was just ‘pumped by political operatives.'”
“How would you feel if someone said, “I don’t know why voters are getting worked up about black people being lynched. ”
The political dynamics are a bit more complex here, so please consider a modification to your analogy. Let’s change it to “black people getting shot by police”.
A legitimate harm is taking place, but it is a corruption inside the context of a larger amount of a legitimate and necessary government activity involving lots of people.
I think you would be very comfortable with public scrutiny focused on the few bad cops that are causing real problems. Perhaps some oversight, training and selection reforms would be in order. Boring and detailed, but that’s the rational way to improve the situation.
However, if the public debate devolved into an ugly set of broader accusations about the trustworthiness of police in general, that would be different. If the President started saying that police are too corrupt and racist to be trusted a few days before an election because he wanted to take advantage of the emotions of the voters, maybe that wouldn’t be so good.
Why do some people feel the “caravan” will make more people from poor countries “try to satisfy their demand” to get into the United States. Because it’s so public, and so much of the coverage has been, “Of course, they should be allowed in; Trump is being very mean and bad”–both by much of the media and by many politicians.
Please show me an example of this coverage. What politicians are saying “they should be allowed in”?
The coverage is so public because of Trump. The media coverage is about the incivility of the process. A small number of commenters are promoting the idea of open borders, but almost no politicians that are answerable to voters are going anywhere near this position because it is not politically popular enough. They are arguing for due process and civility.
They are not calling to let the caravan in.
They are calling to let the people in and file their applications for asylum. Traditionally, this has meant that they can then melt into the general population. Many consider the idea that they should be kept in some sort of custody until their applications are acted on to be inhuman.
You are absolutely right that no one says, “We should have open borders; anyone who wants to come in should be able to.” And you are absolutely right that it is not a politically popular position. But there are a number of politicians who support “sanctuary cities” and who want to “abolish ICE.” And they don’t get slapped down by others in the party. What this muddle amounts to is not “due process and civility” but “once you get in, if you can avoid drawing attention to yourself, you won’t have to leave.”
If the media coverage is only about “the incivility of the process,” that says more about the media’s preoccupation with Trump and their inability to see many things that matter to people who don’t share their politics.
Your next to last paragraph is overgenerous to the Democrats. Even the ones who don’t call for abolishing ICE or don’t openly support sanctuary cities will not support increased funding for border and visa enforcement, putting in place more stringent asylum rules and procedures, or more effective enforcement of the law against employing foreigners without green cards (e.g. e-verify). At least, they won’t support any of those measures except in exchange for “comprehensive reform” expanding legal immigration to such an extent that there will no longer be any significant illegal immigration. So while some Democrats may claim to oppose “open borders,” that is the direct result of their actions.
Similarly, the Democrats claim not to favor voting fraud, but oppose any prophylactic measures to prevent it.
“[I]nability to see many things that matter to people who don’t share their politics” describes not only the Democrats and their media friends but also most establishment Republicans and libertarians (including, it seems, our gracious host).